Staging Virtue: Women, Death, and Liberty in Elise Reimarus's "Cato"

Setting aside a few recent groundbreaking studies, the great majority of women political thinkers studied have been either French or British (Mary Wollstonecraft probably best represented among these).1 With a few important exceptions, there is little material available on the history of women's political thought in other European languages and cultures of the time.2 The present paper works toward closing this gap by introducing readers to Elise Reimarus (1735-1805)-one of the most successful women writers of eighteenth -century Germany, the wealth of whose surviving literary and philosophical productions has suffered almost complete omission from intellectual history. Yet despite her fame and her abundant literary productions, most of her writings have suffered almost complete occlusion from Enlightenment intellectual history.3 The publication in 2005 of Almut Spalding's intellectual biography of Elise Reimarus marks an important turning point in the reception of her work, and (in an appendix) gives several of her writings their first appearance in print - including Reimarus's German rendition of Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato.4 Despite Spalding's masterly account of its reception and its erasure from the literary canon, we still lack an in-depth discussion of the political and philosophical content of Reimarus's Cato alongside other literary productions of the time.